This originally appeared in my HCDE 210 process blog (syklla.wordpress.com), this was my first experience with Interactive Prototyping in my freshman year of college.
For this project I designed a prototype for a scavenger hunt app where the user would gather data about the accessibility of buildings in order to earn points and win prizes. I went through several versions of my app and made many updates to improve it’s function. I went into office hours and spoke to Lucas about improvements to make to my app and received great feedback! He helped me make my app more cohesive, positive and easier to use. I changed my post buttons to be the full app width because of Lucas’ suggestion, his reasoning being Fitts’ Law, which I read about in this article that he sent me .
I showed my prototype to five different users and received both positive and negative feedback. Some of the notes I got were-
“Easy to understand and navigate [but] I didn’t know how to click on the map” – Nate (Test User 2)
“I like the locations button and how it gives you the option for the review button” – Maya (Test User 4)
After each test I did my best to solve the issues that they had found before I showed another user to see if the changes I made had really fixed the problem.
Here is a 30 second video about my final prototype of the app below.
A problem that I encountered was how much every tiny detail matters. Going in I had not considered the importance of the buttons’ exact shape, icon and placement, I thought that if it was just in the area that makes sense and is big enough to click that it would be fine, but I had to go through multiple button types and placements until I figured out the best type. I also had trouble getting my video to under 30 seconds. The questions the sprint raised for me were how do you make a real working app? I am very interested in taking a prototype through all of the steps until I’m left with a final working product. In the future I would wait until I had revised the app and determined everything before inking and coloring my sketches. My final product was not as neat as it could have been because of the white out I had to use and I wasted time having to completely redraw some pages from my app.
I really liked this project. It was a lot of work but was very enjoyable. The pop app was very fun to use and I am definitely looking forward to more similar projects in the future. I also enjoyed getting feedback both from my peers and during office hours and will definitely be using these resources on future design projects.
This kind of work can make a difference in many places in society. A place where it could be very useful is in medical fields. If there were more apps that doctors and patients could both use to keep track of health and medication. Prototyping and seeing how both patients and doctors interact with the application could determine if it would actually be used, or if it would just be something that was forgotten after the first few weeks. This quick prototyping would also allow users themselves to better express what exactly they need in an app.
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